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Deeplinks Blog

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued a new policy on border searches of electronic devices that's full of loopholes and vague language and that continues to allow agents to violate travelers’ constitutional rights. Although the new policy contains a few improvements over rules first published nine years...

When the San Diego police targeted black children for DNA collection without their parents' knowledge in 2016, it highlighted a critical loophole in California law. Now, State Assemblymember Gonzalez Fletcher has introduced legislation—A.B. 1584—that would ensure cops cannot stop-and-swab youth without judicial approval or parental consent. EFF strongly...

Across the country, private companies are deploying vehicles mounted with automated license plate readers (ALPRs) to drive up and down streets to document the travel patterns of everyday drivers. These systems take photos of every license plate they see, tag them with time and location, and upload them to...

Former EFF legal intern Holden Benon co-wrote this blog post. Jennifer Parrish, a child care provider in Minnesota who runs a day care out of her home, finds herself at a crossroads due to a recently passed Minnesota law. The law imposes new background check requirements on child care...

2018 has barely begun, and so has the fight to preserve net neutrality. January 3 was the first day of business in the California state legislature, and state Sen. Scott Wiener used it to introduce legislation to protect net neutrality for Californians. As the FCC has sought to abandon...

What is net neutrality? Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Staff Technologist Dr. Jeremy Gillula, Ph.D. will explain the recent FCC vote and its local consequences. This presentation and discussion will take place via interactive video chat, starting at 6:30pm Central Time.

Should a company be able to shut down competition by asserting copyright in a collection of software commands? Tech giant Cisco Systems thinks so: it’s gone to court to try to prevent its competitor, Arista Networks, from building competing Ethernet switches that rely in part on commands Cisco argues it...

The Supreme Court should recognize and give teeth to the critical, privacy-protecting limitations Congress placed on wiretaps, EFF told the court in an amicus brief we filed with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. When law enforcement officials wiretap someone’s cell phone, the law doesn’t allow them...

It seems like a no-brainer that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) should have to get your permission to snoop on and use the private information you generate as you browse the Internet. In 2017, pressure from the telecom industry led to Congress and the president rolling back protections for broadband...

The movement to encrypt the web reached milestone after milestone in 2017. The web is in the middle of a massive change from non-secure HTTP to the more secure, encrypted HTTPS protocol. All web servers use one of these two protocols to get web pages from the server to...

Americans in 2017 lived under a threat of constant surveillance, both online and offline. While the battle to curtail unaccountable and unconstitutional NSA surveillance continued this year with only limited opportunities appearing in Congress, the struggle to secure community control over surveillance by local police has...

Social media platforms have developed into incredibly useful resources for professional and citizen journalists, and have allowed people to learn about and read stories that may never have been published in traditional media. Sharing on just one of a few large platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube may mean the...

Platform safe harbors have been in the crosshairs of copyright industry lobbyists throughout 2017. All year EFF has observed them advancing their plans around the world to weaken or eliminate the legal protections that have enabled the operation of platforms as diverse as YouTube, the Internet Archive, Reddit, Medium, and...

The latest on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act? It’s still terrible. And this year, the detrimental impacts of the notoriously vague and outdated criminal computer crime statute showed themselves loud and clear. The statute lies at the heart of the Equifax breach, which might have been averted if...